23 January 2008
Well, the final 2007 payrolls
are in, and it turns out the Braves are in the bottom half, 16th out of 30 teams. In fact, we were just 2 spots ahead of Oakland and just one spot ahead of Texas, the team that traded us a massive chunk of its salary in Mark Teixeira. (Of course, thanks to the screwy economics of baseball, there's a $14 million gap between the 17th- and 18th-place teams, the biggest gap on the board other than that between New York and Boston and everyone else.) Here's the list:
| 1 |
New York Yankees |
$218,311,394 |
| 2 |
Boston |
155,402,595 |
| 3 |
Los Angeles Dodgers |
125,581,316 |
| 4 |
New York Mets |
120,927,727 |
| 5 |
Chicago Cubs |
115,943,318 |
| 6 |
Seattle |
114,367,309 |
| 7 |
Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim |
111,038,577 |
| 8 |
Philadelphia |
101,823,122 |
| 9 |
San Francisco |
101,539,796 |
| 10 |
Chicago White Sox |
100,189,832 |
| 11 |
St. Louis |
99,329,875 |
| 12 |
Detroit |
98,519,780 |
| 13 |
Houston |
97,213,020 |
| 14 |
Baltimore |
95,269,977 |
| 15 |
Toronto |
95,069,351 |
| 16 |
Atlanta |
92,634,468 |
| 17 |
Texas |
78,923,435 |
| 18 |
Oakland |
78,482,125 |
| 19 |
Cincinnati |
73,072,635 |
| 20 |
Milwaukee |
72,751,641 |
| 21 |
Minnesota |
71,938,505 |
| 22 |
Cleveland |
71,887,236 |
| 23 |
Arizona |
70,448,367 |
| 24 |
San Diego |
67,490,967 |
| 25 |
Kansas City |
62,264,855 |
| 26 |
Colorado |
61,348,681 |
| 27 |
Pittsburgh |
51,360,907 |
| 28 |
Washington |
43,254,278 |
| 29 |
Florida |
33,072,472 |
| 30 |
Tampa Bay |
31,817,020 |
|
Total |
2,711,274,581 |
|
Average |
90,375,819 |
What's this tell us? Well, first, our payroll increased by almost 10% from the
start of the year.Only four years ago, Time Warner forced the Braves to cut payroll from $95 million to $80 million, and by the end of 2007 we made it all the way back to $95. That suggests we don't have a lot of wiggle room for another in-season trade, or financial flexibility of any sort. Back when we were owned by a man who didn't mind losing tens of millions of dollars a year, we were in the top tier of all of baseball in payroll, and now we're struggling to be in the middle of the pack, below the median and only a couple of million dollars above the average.
So what do you make of this?
